Rich Archbold: Phillips is one voice in the Occupy movement

"I've worked since I was 15," she explains. "I went to college, got married and raised a family."

So how do you go from running a household and looking for a job as a freelance writer to becoming a 44-year-old "peaceful revolutionary" speaking out in support of the Occupy Long Beach movement before the Long Beach City Council and elsewhere?

Life was going along pretty well for Phillips in San Diego, where she and her husband were operating a small business making industrial, electrical and mechanical repairs for printing presses.

"We tried our hardest for nine years, but the economic downturn hit our industry hard and smothered our business," she said. "Without our business income, we were no longer able to pay our mortgage and we lost our home. We had to uproot our son and move from San Diego to Long Beach where my husband got a job."

Phillips said she went back to college at Alliant International University in San Diego and got a degree in international human rights, but "by then the recession was in full flame and there were no jobs." She earned some income as a freelance writer, but those assignments were hard to come by.

Phillips said that for some time she has been a concerned citizen on various issues but had limited her involvement to writing and calling public officials and voting.

But the result, she said, was that she felt patronized and ignored by "my government." What really outraged her was the treatment of financial institutions by Washington politicians.

"These institutions did essentially the same thing as Bernie Madoff, who was sent to prison, but our government says, `Bad banks, here's $800 billion; now go to your room and think about what you've done.' Is that fair?"

What prompted her more vocal activism now was the creation of the Occupy movement, which has spread from New York to the West Coast. She was about to go to an Occupy Los Angeles meeting when she discovered there was a meeting of the fledgling Occupy Long Beach at Bluff Park in October.

"That was in my own backyard, so I went and found people interested in demanding more from our elected officials," she said.

The group, which claims no leaders in the conventional or political sense, asked who wanted to speak before the City Council the next day.

Phillips raised her hand and, before she knew it, she was before the council asking the city's cooperation in occupying a nearby park.

For more than two months, Occupiers have been at Lincoln Park, which is in the shadow of Long Beach City Hall.

I spent part of the night there last Tuesday. It was bitterly cold with windy gusts making you want to find a heated place. The two sets of floodlights placed there by the city gave the area a surreal feel. By city rule, no one can stay in the park after 10 p.m., but sleeping is allowed on the sidewalk.

There were 16 people, primarily homeless, wrapped in heavy blankets and other paraphernalia lying on the sidewalk, their faces barely visible. They looked like 16 mummies lined up for warmth. There also was a small contingent of young Occupiers present.

Wayne Marchyshyn, an Occupier who was standing watch over bins of food, said, "It's quiet now and there's a small number now, but all movements start small." Marchyshyn, who lost his computer business because of the economic downturn, added: "Many of the Occupiers have jobs, and they have to split their time between those jobs and occupying here. It's not easy."

Meanwhile, inside City Hall, a stone's throw away, the council meeting was into its seventh hour with several Occupiers waiting to talk about their concerns. They eventually got to talk, asking the council for further dialogue on their issues.

Phillips, who could not make last Tuesday's council meeting, said she doesn't know what the future holds for the movement or for her personally. She says there is "some tension" at home as she tries to find freelance writing jobs to help the family income while spending time as an activist.

"My husband and I have been married for 22 years. He is very supportive and shares my ideas," she said.

Their 19-year-old son, who is pursuing a singing/songwriting career, was arrested at an Occupy LA demonstration but was released without charges, she said.

Phillips said the real test of the Occupy movement is whether Americans will wake up and find the courage to speak out against what she calls the "behemoth that is the corporate state."

"I am just one of many voices of the movement," she said. "My story is just one of millions of stories of hardworking people living by the rules who feel let down by government. We may not have all the answers, but we have to keep working hard to find solutions."

As a postscript, my conversations with Phillips reminded me of an article Larry Allison wrote after he attended the historic Monterey Pop Music Festival in 1967, which was attended by many people in the counterculture movement of the 1960s protesting against the Vietnam War and participating in the struggle for civil rights and equality for women.

Allison, the Press-Telegram's editorial pages editor who died in October at 77, wrote: "Like it or not, the Movement is too much with us to be shrugged away. Maybe we won't `get with it,' and maybe we won't even be invited.

"But perhaps with a little courage we can see in these children of the electronic age, these people who are so involved, so disarmingly candid and so brutally direct, some signs of goodness, of purpose, and of hope."

Allison wrote that in 1967. How prophetic he was, as much of what he said then applies today to another grass-roots effort trying to change our world.

Rich Archbold is community liaison director and editor emeritus for Press-Telegram. Reach him by mail at 300 Oceangate, Suite 110, Long Beach, CA 90844; calling 562-499-1285; or e-mailing rich.archbold@presstelegram.com.